Roger L'Heureux and his two sons specialize in going with the flow – of water.

Their privately owned family business has supplied fountains, or "water features," as they are often called, to 30 countries on five continents.

And their work produced nearly $20 million in revenues last year for their Concord, Ont.-based Crystal Fountains Inc.

L'Heureux, who started the company in 1967, recalls one financial dry spell that lasted three years. Indoor fountains are a marketing asset and functionally often double as humidifiers in a northern winter, but they're not essential.

In 1965, L'Heureux, an engineer, installed a fountain in his employer's backyard – he worked at a Toronto indoor drain company – and freelanced on others before he started his own company.

"In those days, there were no courses to take and only a few books on the subject. You just pushed water at high pressure to as high as it could go," he says.

"There also wasn't much serious competition in those days because there wasn't nearly as much demand from developers, architects and municipalities as there is today."

He was in the right place at the right time. Toronto sculptor Gerald Gladstone brought him in to collaborate on three fountains for Expo 67 pavilions in Montreal. Either with Gladstone or on his own, L'Heureux later did a number of fountains in Toronto shopping centres, intimate spaces like the Coffee Mill in Yorkville, downtown apartment tower lobbies, courtyards and public buildings.

Perhaps his crowning achievement in Canada is the Toronto Eaton Centre fountain, which opened in 1975 and still entertains millions of visitors every year with its 10-minute cycle of a water column that shoots up 21 metres and then collapses into a six-metre diameter basin – without spectators below getting splashed.

His sons Paul, the CEO, and David L'Heureux, director of commercial products, immersed themselves in the business since their early teens and were ready to take the business further when their father retired to Phoenix, Ariz., in 1987.

By 2002, Crystal Fountains had sold parts, entire fountain systems and design/consulting services to more than 800 museums, parks, recreation centres, commercial and municipal buildings, hotels, casinos and shopping centres around the world.

The most expensive one they've built cost "about a million dollars,'' Paul L'Heureux says.

George Ayer, vice-president, operations, programming/choreography, says about 20 per cent of the company's income is generated by design services and the rest comes from selling nozzles, lights, junction boxes, drains, sequencing devices and other parts to other companies in the business.

The company could have refrained from export markets, but the temptation to go global was too strong to resist. Besides, much larger markets beckoned.

"Toronto is not a big fountain city," explains Paul L'Heureux.

"Not like some overseas cities and Kansas City, which is called the City of Fountains," where one wall fountain in a science centre looks as if it's defying gravity by running up, not down.

Today, the 52-person staff (including a few posted to Dubai and the Cayman Islands) design and machine parts for the L'Heureux projects at the company's Concord head office/manufacturing plant. The hydraulics and mechanics of new fountains, new architecture, lighting and different water orchestrations in a simulated fountain basin are also tested there.

Compared to the current generation of fountains, 18th- and 19th-century versions were less ingeniously mechanical but much more ornate, with elaborate statuary and water sprays in, for example, Rome's Trevi fountain.

Remember Swedish movie star Anita Ekberg frolicking in that fountain in the movie La Dolce Vita? They don't build them like that any more, but rather in a contemporary, modern, high-tech design.

The L'Heureux brothers consulted on one such project – the Crown Fountain in Chicago's Millennium Park. Two 50-foot high glass block towers with built-in fountains that are covered with LED screens, upon which videos of Chicagoans are projected, give the illusion that water is spouting out of their mouths.

Crystal Fountains, in fact, does more and typically larger-scale work in the United States than in Canada.

"Our industry has for years been using coloured LED lighting, which doesn't use a lot of electricity. Nozzles have also been changed to create a spray effect, but with less water discharged.

"Pumps that push water through the nozzles are smaller and use less electricity. There are also fountains run by solar power, and other water and energy conservation features in development," he said.

Robert Mikula, the company's senior creative supervisor of projects, adds that "water is typically recirculated and reused. LED lighting helps reduce energy consumption and cuts down on maintenance, which used to be every two years instead of every five years today.

``We can also reduce power needed for the water pump and shut off water displays when they aren't needed," he said.

Such environmental and sustainable features are also of great interest in eastern Europe, and "in trying to bring their standards up (to North American levels)," says Simon Gardiner, Crystal Fountains' creative design director. "They want new malls, and world-class water features, new ways to show water," he says.

Ayer summed it up this way: "Humans need a pleasing environment to live in. The best things that have happened in architecture is that we live in a place where there is a healthy tension between pure engineering and pure art."

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